AI, Safety and Low Power, Compounding Complexity

AI, Safety and Low Power, Compounding Complexity
by Bernard Murphy on 04-28-2020 at 6:00 am

Hoc in a low-power ASIL-D design

The nexus of complexity in SoC design these days has to be in automotive ADAS devices. Arteris IP highlighted this in the Linley Processor Conference recently where they talked about an ADAS chip that Toshiba had built. This has multiple vision and AI accelerators, both DSP and DNN-based. It is clearly aiming for ISO 26262 ASIL D … Read More


How Should I Cache Thee? Let Me Count the Ways

How Should I Cache Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
by Bernard Murphy on 09-25-2019 at 5:00 am

cache hierarchy

Caching intent largely hasn’t changed since we started using the concept – to reduce average latency in memory accesses and to reduce average power consumption in off-chip reads and writes. The architecture started out simple enough, a small memory close to a processor, holding most-recently accessed instructions and data … Read More


Intelligence in the Fog

Intelligence in the Fog
by Bernard Murphy on 06-12-2019 at 5:00 am

By now, you should know about AI in the cloud for natural language processing, image ID, recommendation, etc, etc (thanks to Google, Facebook, AWS, Baidu and several others) and AI on the edge for collision avoidance, lane-keeping, voice recognition and many other applications. But did you know about AI in the fog? First, a credit… Read More


Connecting Coherence

Connecting Coherence
by Bernard Murphy on 02-27-2018 at 7:00 am

If a CPU or CPU cluster in an SoC is the brain of an SoC, then the interconnect is the rest of the central nervous system, connecting all the other processing and IO functions to that brain. This interconnect must enable these functions to communicate with the brain, with multiple types of memory, and with each other as quickly and predictably… Read More


Making Cars Smarter And Safer

Making Cars Smarter And Safer
by Tom Simon on 04-18-2017 at 12:00 pm

The news media has naturally focused on the handful of deaths that have occurred while auto-pilot features have been enabled. In reality, automobile deaths are occurring at a lower rate now than ever. In 2014 the rate was 1.08 deaths per 100 million miles driven. Compare that to the 5.06 per 100M miles in 1960, or a whopping 24.09 in… Read More


CEO Interview: Charlie Janac of Arteris

CEO Interview: Charlie Janac of Arteris
by Daniel Nenni on 10-17-2016 at 7:00 am

Charlie Janac ArterisIP

When Charlie Janac talks, people listen, absolutely. Charlie’s 30 year career spans EDA, IP, semiconductor equipment, nano-technology, and venture capital. For the last 11 years he has been CEO of interconnect IP provider Arteris who invented the industry’s first commercial network on chip (NoC) SoC interconnect IP… Read More


SOC Design Techniques that Enable Autonomous Vehicles

SOC Design Techniques that Enable Autonomous Vehicles
by Tom Simon on 10-11-2016 at 4:00 pm

Robots – we have all been waiting for them since we were young. We watched Star Wars, or in the case of the slightly longer-lived of us, we watched Forbidden Planet or Lost in Space. We knew that our future robot friends would be able to move around and interact with their environment. What we did not foresee long ago was that instead of… Read More


How to Bring Coherency to the World of Cache Memory

How to Bring Coherency to the World of Cache Memory
by Tom Simon on 07-11-2016 at 12:00 pm

As the size and complexity of System On Chip design has rapidly expanded in recent years, the need to use cache memory to improve throughput and reduce power has increased as well. Originally, cache memory was used to prevent what was then a single processor from making expensive off chip access for program or data memory. With the… Read More